The Natural Gardener
My 2020 garden wildlife diary has, so far, seen me note down some pretty lively goings-on. I’ve spied lots of interesting animals, too – it’s amazing what you encounter if you just sit, relax and watch the wildlife world go by. In late March there was the sparrowhawk that popped by for lunch one day to pick off one of our many starlings – he spent a good 10 minutes making sure it was completely dead before he flew off to eat it. There have been endless red kites soaring and whistling up above, green- and goldfinches, pipistrelle bats at dusk and red-tailed bumblebees. Some other bees made a nest in an unused pipe in our wall and it’s been lovely to hear them buzz back and forth. A sneaky spider spotted the new residents and made his web around the hole so a few unfortunate bees got tangled up in his clutches. I gently removed the web – I decided our bees need all the help they can get.
Perhaps the most intriguing – and distressing – event happened quite recently. In the middle of the night we were woken abruptly through open windows by unearthly screams from the front garden. A bird? A frog, perhaps? Not at night, surely. By the time we’d gathered ourselves it had stopped, so we thought no more of it. The next morning, though, we found a hedgehog carcass, scooped entirely of its soft parts, with only its prickly outer left. The poor thing had been calling out in distress. This obviously wasn’t the work of an amateur pet cat, so for that we’re grateful – this was the work of a professional, a discerning hunter scraping out its nightly snack from an unpalatable coat like we would an avocado.
To get a clear idea of the culprit I contacted Garden Wildlife Health (www.gardenwildlifehealth.org), where you can report diseased or dead animals to help wildlife charities gather information about what’s going on in our gardens. My dad thought an owl may have been responsible – an appealing thought, though I received a prompt reply from an ZSL vet, who let me know that this style of predation is common in badgers, but that it might also have been a fox. It’s a bloodthirsty world out there!